"The other Jews call me a heretic. Well, I am. And worse, an iconoclast too: my goal is nothing less than the breaking of all religious containers (and not just Judaism) for the sake of liberating God. In the words of my 18th century namesake and predecessor, Yakov Leib Frank, 'All the faiths and conducts and the books that have been written till today -- everyone who reads in them is like someone who has turned his head backwards and is looking at things already dead. All of it comes from the Gate of Death. But the wise man's eyes are ever in his head so he must look towards He-Who-Walks-In-Front.' Like Frank and the other radical antinomian Kabbalists who came before him, I worship God and not religion; I seek for His salvation and not my own.....or, even less-so, yours."

-- Reb Yakov Leib HaKohain

The goal of participating in the Continuing Incarnation of God (as C. G. Jung described it in his magnum opus, Answer to Job, and we of Donmeh West teach and practice it in our "Yalhakian" Neo-Sabbatian Kabbalah) is not to become God, but to assist God in His struggle towards reunification with Himself by becoming, like the Biblical Job, an Eved HaShem, or 'Servant of the Lord.'

This means that I -- as a portal through which God returns to Himself -- am no more the God passing through me on His way to wholeness than the light bulb is the electricity passing through it on its way to the darkness.

Like the light bulb, however, we cannot help but be changed in some subtle way by that "electricity"; but in the final analysis when the switch is turned off, the energy stops and we remain no more than what we were at the start -- a light bulb -- modified at some level by the experience of having been illuminated for a time, but only a light bulb, nonetheless, to be discarded for the next one that will come to replace it.

This is as true of Sabbatai Zevi (the 17th century Jewish avatar on whom our Kabbalah of the Continuing Incarnation is based) as it was of Jesus, Buddha, Ramakrishna, Jacob Frank, Meher Baba, and all the other Avatars and near-Avatars of history -- past, present and future.

God never was, is not, and never will be a man; but man
can, should and will become a vessel for the Liberation of God. However,
even then, even having become such a vessel of holiness, "The enlightened
person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego
before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries,
who encompases him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth
and vast as the sky." (C. G. Jung, Answer to Job, par. 758)

"In my experience, God prefers what Jung has called the 'natural man' to be a vessel for His 'continuing incarnation' (Answer to Job, par. 746) -- the one who belches and farts and scratches his ass; who is 'a thing despised and rejected by men' (Isaiah 53:3); who is 'a daily laughingstock and the butt of everybody's jokes' (Jeremiah 20:7); who is 'married to a whore' (Hosea 1:2) and nothing more than a stinking goat-herd (Amos 1:1). That is, He prefers the guilty fools and ignoramuses of the world, like you and me, and not, in Jung's words, the 'guiltless ones' like Them -- the learned and the pious 'rabbis' of all religions -- who stand in judgment over the impious likes of Us but are, in fact, themselves excluded from union with the Divine because, again according to Jung, 'In them the Dark God would find no room.' "

-- Reb Yakov Leib HaKohain

DONMEH WEST, is a private foundation founded in 1972 for religious education in Neo-Sabbatian Kabbalah and related subjects such as comparative religion and Jungian spirituality, as studied, practiced, taught, written and published about by its leading interpreter and practitioner in the West, Reb Yakov Leib HaKohain.

DONMEH WEST, with almost 1000 members and still growing, is the largest, oldest and arguably most controversial Kabbalah collective on the internet. It is not intended, however, as a forum where people exchange their personal ideas and opinions about Kabbalah or mysticism in general with each other, but rather as a "virtual academy" with a singular purpose and point of view -- that is, the dissemination and practice of the 330-year old Kabbalistic transmission that began in 1666 with the Jewish Avatar Sabbatai Zevi, was continued in the 18th century by his spiritual successor, Jacob Frank, and then reconfigured for our own time and place by their spiritual heir, Reb Yakov Leib HaKohain. There are excellent virtual communities on the internet devoted to other Kabbalistic teachings and points of view, but Donmeh West is not one of them.

DONMEH WEST, therefore, is not a place to "evaluate" or "debate" about the validity of "Yalhakian" Neo-Sabbatian Kabbalah, but a "virtual classroom" in which students who do not know what that transmission is about learn from teachers who do -- teachers who have been trained by Reb Yakov Leib HaKohain and are therefore qualified to disseminate his teachings. Individuals with a need to debate and argue over a subject before they know enough about it to have an opinion will find Donmeh West not to their liking and are advised not to join. Similarly, fundamentalist proselytizers for any religion -- especially those of Christianity, Islam and even (regrettably) Judaism -- are particularly unwelcome by Reb Yakov Leib and his Chaverim, and are strongly advised against joining Donmeh West.

DONMEH WEST does not seek to convert Jews to other religions -- or, for that matter, to convert members of other religions to Judaism. It is, instead, a non-sectarian interfaith movement, growing out of the ancient teachings of Esoteric Judaism as radicalized and extended to the non-Jewish world in the 17th century by Sabbatai Zevi, and continued thereafter in a chain of successors now culminating, in the West, with Reb Yakov Leib HaKohain. Like Sabbatai Zevi and then Jacob Frank, Reb Yakov Leib HaKohain "entered" other realms of faith (i.e., Hinduism, Islam and Christianity) not to become a practicing Hindu, Muslim or Christian but, by doing so, to retrieve the Holy Sparks from those great religions and reunite them in his own person with those of Israel, in order to "Repair the Face of God". He neither believes nor advocates that other Jews should do the same. Again, like Sabbatai Zevi before him, his multiple religious "conversions" were a sacrificial action performed by him on behalf of others in order to restore the unity of God.

"I am not now, nor have I ever been, a rabbi; don't give rabbis a bad name, or insult me, by ever calling me one either behind my back or, what is even worse, to my face. 'Reb' is an honorary title -- like the non-military
'Colonel' in the South -- and not (God forbid) a designation of, or claim to, rabbinic ordination. Like you, I'm just a damn-fool ignoramus; the difference between us, however, if any, is that I know I am and you still think you're not."